Glossary
Explainer video
Also called: Explainer, Animated explainer
Definition
An explainer video is a short video, often animated and narrated, that explains one idea, product, process or concept clearly enough for someone new to the topic to understand it.
What “explainer video” means
An explainer has a teaching goal: by the end, the viewer understands something they didn’t before. Classic examples are a startup’s homepage video, an onboarding walkthrough, a science short or a “how it works” piece. Most combine a narrated script with visuals that illustrate each sentence: motion graphics, animation, screen recordings or sometimes a presenter.
Explainers used to be long-ish horizontal videos for websites. Today, many are vertical shorts of under three minutes, made for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, where the same principles apply with less time: one idea, a strong hook, a clear structure and a single call to action.
Why it matters for short explainer videos
On short-form platforms, viewers decide in the first seconds whether to stay. An explainer that opens with a question or a surprising consequence, then pays it off visually, has a reason to be watched to the end. A video that tries to cover a whole topic usually ends up shallow and gets skipped.
Explainers also age well. A clear explanation of a concept keeps being useful long after a trend has passed, which makes it a good building block for a channel, a course or a product’s documentation.
Example
A 60-second explainer about how GPS works: a hook (“Your phone never talks to satellites”), a setup (it only listens), a core in three steps (satellites broadcast time and position, the phone measures delays, four distances fix one point), a surprising detail (a millionth of a second of error is roughly 300 meters) and a one-line recap with a call to action.
In Motiongist
How Motiongist handles it
Explainers are what Motiongist is built for. You start from an idea, a script, a web link or a document; it writes or adapts the narration, plans scenes, animates them in sync with one of 8 voices in one of 10 languages, and adds word-by-word captions. Videos are vertical 9:16, in three lengths (45–60, 90–120 or 150–180 seconds), in 2D or 3D.
You see the exact credit price before confirming, and you can review the storyboard for free before rendering. Fact-checking stays your job: the script follows your sources when you provide them, but you publish it.